9/11 Poetry

Recently I was asked to participate in a commemorative ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I began researching poems in hopes of finding something that we could include in the event. While I did not manage to find an appropriate poem, it was interesting reading through a lot of the poems inspired by that day.

Many of the 9/11-inspired poems, especially the most well-known and well regarded poems like "Photograph from September 11 by Wislawa Szymborska, focus on the memory of bodies falling from the sky, those visual images of men and women in business attire jumping from the burning buildings, in a sense "choosing" certain death over the hell of destruction (although it's a mistake to think of it as a choice at all).

I wrote a short story that also touches on these particular images, so I understand why they're compelling and why they linger in the mind. In a very real way, creative writing, and especially poetry, says what we cannot otherwise say. To paraphrase one expert on the subject, poems exist to explain themselves.

These 9/11 poems meditate on the haunting images of falling bodies, because what else besides poetry can really do these memories justice, even if poetry itself remains inadequate? Only poetry can explain the unexplainable, something so grief-inducing and moving as the sight of those people leaping into oblivion. We can never get used to the images of those falling bodies, so all we can really do is write poems that try to capture that bottomless feeling of seeing these people, the sickening grief and boundless compassion that we felt as we saw the images and realized what we were seeing. We would have done anything, but we can do nothing, and so we turn to art and poetry.